Secrecy and Society Secrecy and Society ISSN: 2377-6188 Volume 2 Number 2 Teaching Secrecy Article 13 January 2021 Giants: The Global Power Elite Giants: The Global Power Elite Susan Maret San Jose State University, [email protected]Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/secrecyandsociety Part of the Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Other Sociology Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, and the Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons Recommended Citation Maret, Susan. 2021. "Giants: The Global Power Elite." Secrecy and Society 2(2). https://doi.org/10.31979/2377-6188.2021.020213 https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/ secrecyandsociety/vol2/iss2/13 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Information at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Secrecy and Society by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
16
Embed
Giants: The Global Power Elite - SJSU ScholarWorks | Open ...
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
Secrecy and Society Secrecy and Society ISSN: 2377-6188
Volume 2 Number 2 Teaching Secrecy Article 13
January 2021
Giants: The Global Power Elite Giants: The Global Power Elite
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/secrecyandsociety
Part of the Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Other Sociology Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, and the Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons
Recommended Citation Maret, Susan. 2021. "Giants: The Global Power Elite." Secrecy and Society 2(2). https://doi.org/10.31979/2377-6188.2021.020213 https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/secrecyandsociety/vol2/iss2/13
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Information at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Secrecy and Society by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected].
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
are relatively distinctive in that they see power as originally rooted in
organizations, not in individuals, voluntary associations, interest groups, and parties, as mainstream political science does, nor in classes, as
Marxists do, although they certainly agree that voluntary associations, interest groups, and classes can arise historically in some countries from
their organizational base, as has been the case in industrialized capitalist societies. On the other hand, Mills, Hunter, and the field of research they
created do not see organizations in the neutral and benign way. (97)2
Here I pose that while Hunter and Mills certainly opened the proverbial door
to show us how groups with mutual interests act and react, Giants also follows in
the tradition of those texts (or genre) that provide the basis for investigations of
the intermeshed national/transnationalist global structure (Chomsky 2016;
Domhoff 1978, 1990, 2014, 20183; Gil 1991; Knudsen 2016; Mann 2013; Prewitt
and Stone 1973; Richardson, Kakabadse, and Kakabadse 2011; Sklar 1980,
1986; Sutton 1978),4 "superclass" (Rothkopf 2009; Phillips 2018, 27), and
"plutocrats" (Freeland 2012). Of particular significance to Giants is also Michael
Mann's (1986) theory of four "overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks
of power" that consists of the ideological, economic, military, and political (1).
The Book
In its chapters, Philips (2018) identifies and expands on the members of the
Global Power Elite, who "are key stewards of a major part of the world's financial
wealth" (303). This wealth is being "used for economic colonization and
privatization of the public commons in complete disregard for human rights"
(Phillips 2018, 303). Below, I sketch each chapter in Giants alongside the
2 Also see Domhoff (2007a).
3 And various iterations of the influential Who Rules America published from 1967-2014.
4 See Robinson 2005 and Schiller, Basch, and Blanc‐Szanton (1992) as a foundation.
3
Maret: Giants: The Global Power Elite
Published by SJSU ScholarWorks, 2021
strengths of the book:
Introduction, Who Rules the World is written by sociologist William I.
Robinson, who is no stranger to documenting the "power networks" that
constitute the basis of global capitalism, TCCs, and transnationalism in his own
research.5 In the introduction, Robinson (2018) writes of Giants that
...Professor Phillips exposes an inner core of 389 individuals drawn from the
upper echelons of the transnational capitalist class who stand at the very apex of this global power structure. An earlier generation of power elite
studies focused on the corporate and political networks that rule at the national level. But this earlier generation of studies has become outdated in
the wake of capitalist globalization. What were national capitalist classes
have developed through the transnational integration of their capitals into a transnational capitalist class. (17)
Chapter 1, Transnational Capitalist Class Power Elite: A Seventy Year
History traces "the transition from the nation state power elites described by
[C.Wright] Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global
capital around the world" (Phillips 2018, 9).6 Among the history that Phillips
includes is an examination of Mills' higher-circle policy elites and a review of the
literature on the TCC.
Chapter 2, The Global Financial Giants: The Central Core of Global
Capitalism consists of seventeen [asset manager] firms that "not only invest in
each other but in many hundreds" more (Phillips 2018, 11, 35). These firms
range from BlackRock, Vanguard, J.P. Morgan Chase, to Morgan Stanley & Co, and
their investment connections and a subset of firms termed New Giants and Near
5 Robinson's faculty page at UC Santa Barbara for a list of publications:
http://robinson.faculty.soc.ucsb.edu/
6 As in the Forbes 400, Definitive Ranking of the Wealthiest Americans,
https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/#4041d667e2ff
4
Secrecy and Society, Vol. 2, No. 2 [2021], Art. 13
Chomsky, Noam. 2016. Who Rules the World? New York: Metropolitan Books,
Henry Holt and Company.
Cobham, Alex, Petr Janský, and Markus Meinzer. 2018. "A Half-century of
Resistance to Corporate Disclosure." Transnational Corporations 25, no. 3: 1-
27.
Crozier, Michel J., Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. 1975. The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral
Owen, David, Saburō Ōkita, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. 1984. Democracy Must
Work: A Trilateral Agenda for the Decade: A Task Force Report to the
Trilateral Commission. New York: New York University Press.
Prewitt, Kenneth, and Alan Stone. 1973. The Ruling Elites: Elite theory, Power,
and American Democracy. New York: HarperCollins.
Rahim, Mia Mahmudur. 2019. "Quest for a Global Code of Conduct for TNCs - A Grim Tale." In Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations, edited by Mia
Mahmudur Rahim, 1-22. Cham: Springer.
Richardson, Ian, Andrew Kakabadse, and Nada Kakabadse. 2011. Bilderberg
People: Elite Power and Consensus in World Affairs. New York: Routledge.
Risso, Linda. 2014. Propaganda and Intelligence in the Cold War: The NATO
Information Service. New York: Routledge.
Robinson, William I. 2005. "Global Capitalism: The New Transnationalism and
the Folly of Conventional Thinking." Science & Society 69, no. 3: 316-328.
Rothkopf, David J. 2009. Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World
They Are Making. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Sagafi-Nejad, Tagi, John H. Dunning, and Howard V. Perlmutter. 2008. The UN and Transnational Corporations: From Code of Conduct to Global Compact.
United Nations Intellectual History Project. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc‐Szanton. 1992. "Towards a
Definition of Transnationalism." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
645, no. 1: ix-xiv.
Simmel, Georg. 1906. "The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies."
American Journal of Sociology 11, no. 4: 441-498.
Sklar, Holly. 1986. Reagan, Trilateralism, and the Neoliberals: Containment and
Intervention in the 1980s. Boston: South End Press.
___, ed. 1980. Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for
World Management. Boston: South End Press, 1980.
Sutton, Anthony. 1978. Trilaterals Over Washington. Scottsdale, AZ: August
Corp.
Transnational Institute. 2019. State of Power: Finance.
https://www.tni.org/en/stateofpower2019
United Nations. n.d. The Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact.